


life in slow motion: freeze the frame and roll it again

by anonymousAlchemist



Category: The Flash (Comics), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Gen, and another 2k of future speculation, i tagged this as shipping but it's only tangentially a relationship story, i wanted to write 2k of Barry Allen backstory ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 23:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3746794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymousAlchemist/pseuds/anonymousAlchemist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Or: Barry Allen, Fastest Man Alive: a character study)</p><p>What is there to be said about Barry Allen? </p><p>He’s got a dad in prison and a mom ten feet under. He’s got his best friend’s dad as his foster parent and his best friend is his crush is his pseudo sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	life in slow motion: freeze the frame and roll it again

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the fic I want to read, but then it turned out all experimental-like. Tell me what you think!

What is there to be said about Barry Allen? He’s got a dad in prison and a mom ten feet under. He’s got his best friend’s dad as his foster parent and he’s got his best friend as his crush as his pseudo sister. 

Barry Allen has a smile like sunshine and is perpetually late with unrealistic excuses, Barry Allen can analyze a crime scene with uncanny Sherlock-like precision and Barry Allen skips work to look at the lingering remnants of weird crime. 

A lot of people think he’s sort of crazy, cracked in the head, because no matter what he keeps saying that his dad didn’t kill his mom, but everyone knows Henry Allen killed Nora Allen, they’ve got fingerprints and blood splatter patterns and no one else was in the house that night, so who else could have killed her? 

Barry Allen talks about red lightning and the man in a yellow suit and the police put a blanket on his shoulders and say “I’m sorry, son,” and ignore the frantic babble spewing out of his mouth. 

Barry Allen cries himself to sleep every night for a month and Iris West sneaks into his room and sleeps next to him. 

(Joe West pretends to know nothing about it. Joe West can already see that this boy is probably going to be his son-in-law, and dammit, that is too much to deal with at this moment and who is he to begrudge Barry Allen some comfort. They’re kids. Just kids.)

Barry Allen screams at Joe West, says “I want to go see my dad,” says “My dad didn’t kill her, Joe, my dad’s innocent!,” says, “Please, Joe,” and Joe’s heart breaks and breaks and breaks, because here is this kid, here is the bright best friend of his daughter, and here is the boy whose dad killed his mom and left bloodstains all over the house, and here is the man he is going to become, stuck in the past and always, always too slow. 

Barry Allen sneaks out of the house on Sunday mornings, Barry Allen sneaks out of the school during lunch hour, Barry Allen sneaks out of the house at 2:00 in the morning and falls asleep at the front gate of Iron Heights Penitentiary.

Joe comes to pick him up at 3:00 AM after Iris crept into his room and said, “Daddy, Barry’s gone.” And Joe doesn’t ask how she knows. 

They don’t talk on the ride back home. 

___ 

For everyone in the West household their lives are broken up into B.B. and A.B. 

Before Barry and After Barry. 

Before, Barry Allen is Iris’s absolute best friend in the entire world, and half the time Barry Allen is over at the West house, or Iris is over at Barry’s, and Joe is friends with Nora and Henry and they trade off watching the kids, and if Joe has to work late at the station he calls Nora and asks if she can take Iris for a couple of hours, and she says “yes, of course,” and Barry and Iris are delighted with the impromptu playdates. 

After, Barry Allen is Iris’s absolute best friend in the entire world and he sleeps down the hall from her except when she’s sleeping next to him in the room, and Barry doesn’t talk except to protest that his dad is innocent and they go to Barry’s mom’s funeral and it’s terrible and sad and Iris doesn’t know how to fix this, how to fix him. 

(Now, their lives are broken up into B.F. and A.F, but that’s a different story altogether.)

Barry Allen never completely stops talking about the man in the yellow suit.

Iris West punches Tony Woodward when he calls Barry crazy. Iris West chips her nails and ends up in the principal’s office during lunch. Barry Allen ends up in the principal’s office half an hour later. When asked about it later, Barry mumbles that “after you left, he called you stupid” and shrugs. 

The rumors don’t stop after that, but they become whispers instead of shouts. 

Eventually, though, eventually Barry Allen stops crying himself to sleep and starts smiling again. It’s a good day when Joe West walks downstairs to the kitchen and finds Barry and Iris laughing in the kitchen with a pile of pancakes and a sink full of dirty dishes and pancake batter splatters all over the counter top. 

He makes them help him clean them up, of course. 

___

For most of their lives, Iris and Barry are IrisandBarry, you see one and then you see the other. When they’re eight they swap lunches, when they’re twelve they pass notes across classrooms, when they’re sixteen they share Joe’s old car and scream at each other while they’re learning to drive. They hold hands in hallways, sling a shoulder around each other affectionately, get into ridiculous slap-fights that end up in giggles. They claim they’re not dating. In junior year of high school, there is a betting pool based around the question: are Barry Allen and Iris West an item? Nobody wins. Nobody knows. 

Loving Iris West is carved into Barry Allen’s skin, worn and grooved lines through his chest and his heart, old and familiar and ecstatic and agonizing. 

Loving Barry Allen is like the pump of blood through Iris West’s veins, necessary and hidden. It’s like breathing, an unconscious system, inhale, exhale, love, love love. 

Barry Allen and Iris West go to different colleges. Barry to Sun City University[1] on a chemistry scholarship, Iris to Central City College still undecided, also on scholarship. (People who are surprised they don’t go to the same college: Joe West, Henry Allen, Iris West, Barry Allen, the entirety of Central City High School’s graduating class).

College is good for them. Sun City holds none of Central’s ghosts, at Sun City University no one knows Barry Allen’s name and in Sun City no one knows his history. Iris and Joe help him move into his freshman dorm room. Joe gives him a hug, Iris gives him a kiss on the cheek. When they leave, his roommate, Something-or-other Jordan, looks at him curiously.

“That your girlfriend? Because dude, she is banging.” 

Barry smiles awkwardly and says “No, she’s just, uh, she’s just Iris.” It’s hard to explain. 

He doesn’t think Jordan-first-name-Hal and him will be friends. He’s wrong. Hal Jordan[2] is from Coast City, wants to be a pilot, and is resentfully attending college at the request of his mom. He drops out before freshman year ends, signing up for the air force, but not before Hal drags Barry to frat parties, to three in the morning drunken benders, to an airshow where Hal almost gets arrested trying to get up close and personal with the planes. He learns about Hal’s dad and Hal learns about Barry’s mom and the Yellow Streak and Hal nods like he believes him even though he probably doesn’t. Barry appreciates it anyway. When Hal drops out, they don’t lose touch, Hal sends him pictures of the view from X feet in the air and Barry sends Hal videos of weird chemistry experiments. 

Eventually though, they lose touch. It happens. The messages just stop one day, and Barry gives it up for a loss. People move on. (Everyone leaves, eventually.)

(Barry and Hal don’t meet again until they’re twenty-seven, when Barry is dressed all in red and Hal is all in green, like some sort of meta-supernatural-extraterrestrial Christmas. It’s the middle of a minor alien invasion, but they spend a moment staring at each other in disbelieving shock. Of all the people in the world. 

“Barry?!”  
“Hal?!”

Oliver’’s voice crackles through the comms. “Flash, Green Lantern, we’re here to fight, not to stand around gawking.”

And they get back to work. Later though, after debrief, they sit in a bar and trade origin stories while drinking bottles of beer that don’t work on Barry. Picking their friendship back up is easy as pie.)

Other than Hal, Barry is sort of a loner for the first couple of years of college. He knows people, he has friends but no close friends, goes on dates but has no girlfriend, takes class after class of chemistry, criminology, forensic science. He tutors a pretty journalism major in criminology for pocket money (“Why are you taking criminology anyway, Clark?” “U-uh, sector requirements.”)[4]. He’s got a mission, he’s got to prove his dad is innocent. He spends his tutoring money on bus trips to crime scenes that he’s not supposed to be at, he goes to Gotham, to Metropolis, to Starling City, New York, Smallville, chasing weird crimes. He hears about the shadow-rumors who hunt criminals in Gotham, the fields where glowing space-rock meteor showers hit, he hears about strange sights in the sky. Nothing leads back to the Yellow Streak. 

He doesn’t tell Joe about it, but Iris finds out when she texts him and his location comes up as “Metropolis” and not “Sun City.” She doesn’t say anything about it, just smiles at him sympathetically over Skype, she’s given up on his small neuroses long ago, she can’t begrudge him his hope. 

Iris surprises him on the weekend of his 21st birthday by driving from Central to Sun and showing up at his dorm room with cake and alcohol. It’s wonderful. They sit on his bedroom floor and eat half a chocolate cake between the two of them and a third of the handle of vodka, before going bowling, just the two of them, and that night is something he remembers a long time later because there are only a handful of perfect nights a person is allotted in a lifetime and for Barry Allen, that is one of them. 

Barry had thought he had stopped loving Iris, or at least suppressed it to a reasonable point where he could get on with his life without having a massive debilitating crush on his best friend but he sees her smile with a smudge of chocolate on her lip and he suddenly desperately needs to kiss her but he doesn’t because he’s scared. He almost tells her he loves her that night, but he can’t. He can’t.

(In another lifetime, where he’s not chasing ghosts, he does. They get married a year later, right out of college, and there are three proud parents at the wedding who had seen this coming years ago.)

That’s Barry Allen in a nutshell, scared of losing and scared of winning and always running in place.  
____

Barry Allen moves back to Central City after college. Joe asks him, “Don’t you want to go to grad school?” and Barry shrugs, and Joe sighs because Barry Allen is so damn smart and all he wants to do is to be a CSI. 

Barry Allen goes to work. Barry Allen hangs out with Iris West. Barry Allen skips work to check out weird crime scenes in other cities. Barry Allen visits his dad in Iron Heights and his heart aches. Barry Allen sleeps, eats, wakes, rinse, repeat. Wheels spinning in the air, legs on a treadmill.  
___

The lightning strikes, and everything changes.

**Author's Note:**

> [This fic was borne out of a number of headcanons and half formed desires. I haven’t found the fic I want to read in the Flash fandom yet so I resigned myself to writing it. I wanted more  
> Iris-and-Barry interaction as the best friends/kid soulmates that they must have been as kids, I want more of angry-kid-barry-allen, who sneaks out of the house to go see his dad, i want more confused-barry-allen who knows what he saw but can’t explain it and nobody believes him and I want more team flash hanging out together as a bunch of nerds who were really awkward human beings and still not super used to having friends but are my broship ot3. Also more of Joe West being like “i have to raise two kids now and they’re totally in love and one of them has their parents all fucked up and man they’re totally going to get married when they’re grown up fuck my life” and I wanted to explore the way Barry feels about Iris cause man, if we assume that they are soulmate5life, what’s that like. what’s that like to go through life. And the idea of the flash being too late, too slow, because I love that theme. Also I wanted some Wally West because Wally is my Flash more than Barry is and yeah. I also wanted the suggestion of a larger DC universe, message me for my thoughts on that cause i am fleshing that out but probs wont do much with it.]  
> [I may write a sequel focusing on Iris and how having Barry in her life has affected her, because we really don’t see enough of Iris outside of the context of Barry’s love interest] 
> 
> [1] Sun City University is the comics canon university that Barry Allen attends, I decided to borrow it.  
> [2] Borrowed Hal Jordan cause according to wiki, Barry and Hal are friends, and I decided that cw!Barry needs more friends. Just like cw!Barry doesn’t quite share comics!Barry traits, same here with Hal-please tell me if I’m making him OOC Green Lantern isnt one of my main fandoms.  
> [3] In this verse, which is an amalgamation of cw and headcanon, the bats exist but are only known as rumor. Arrow is the first vigilante to be truly known about, and Batman is kind of a myth-legend-rumor that no one outside of Gotham believes. Eventually, Batman gets the gang together and Justice League happens, although they’re all like “wait you’re real.”  
> [4] surprise!superman. here, supes is thinking about being a hero but hasnt debuted yet. He’s taking criminology because he thinks it might give him and edge. Soon after Arrow and Flash in this verse, he debuts as Superman, the tipping point that convinces Bats to out himself as a real thing. 
> 
> Follow me @ anonymousalchemist.tumblr.com for more fandom shenaniganery.


End file.
